A year of build-up, not the peak
The protest wave of 1967 is often blended into the better-known upheavals of 1968, but the two years are not the same. The strikes and street fighting of Paris, the Prague Spring and the Tet Offensive all belong to 1968. The Paris events are remembered through May 1968 strikes, and the Czechoslovak reform programme began in January 1968 when Alexander Dubcek became party leader. What 1967 supplied was the groundwork: new organisations, new tactics, and a growing sense among young people in many countries that ordinary politics was not listening.
The United States
The war in Vietnam was the largest single cause of protest in America in 1967. By the end of the year there were close to half a million US troops in Vietnam, and the Vietnam troop levels had become a daily subject of argument. The main events came in a clear sequence.
- April: the Spring Mobilization brought large crowds to New York and San Francisco on 15 April.
- April: Martin Luther King denounced the war publicly at Riverside Church on 4 April, linking it to the struggle at home.
- October: a week of action around the Oakland induction centre, followed by the march on the Pentagon on 21-22 October.
Alongside these, summer brought the Newark riot and the Detroit uprising, which pulled attention toward race and poverty at home. The year’s protests were not only about the war.
Germany
In West Berlin, students had already been questioning the postwar order. On 2 June 1967 a demonstration against the visit of the Shah of Iran ended with the fatal police shooting of a student, Benno Ohnesorg. The killing is usually treated as a turning point: it radicalised parts of the West German student left and strengthened distrust of the press and the authorities. The West Berlin protests had Vietnam as one theme among several, including university reform and the legacy of Nazism.
Japan
On 8 October 1967 students clashed with police near Haneda Airport in Tokyo, trying to stop Prime Minister Eisaku Sato from leaving on a trip to South Vietnam and other Asian countries. The radical student federations, usually grouped as Zengakuren Haneda in accounts of the period, fought with helmets and staves, and one student died. A second round of clashes followed in November, when Sato travelled to the United States. The episode showed that Japan’s student left was far more militant than most of its Western counterparts at that time.
Western and Southern Europe
The Dutch Provo movement had taken the lead in playful, provocative street politics in Amsterdam from 1965, and it dissolved itself in 1967, though its style of happenings and its “white plans” were widely copied. In Spain, student organisations were pressing against the Franco regime’s controlled university unions, and protest and police repression went hand in hand. In Italy, the autumn brought Italian student occupations at several universities, starting with Turin and Milan in November and December 1967, which set the stage for the larger wave of 1968.
Eastern Europe
Czechoslovakia gives a good example of how 1967 differs from 1968. In June 1967 the Czechoslovak Writers Union congress openly criticised censorship, and at the end of October students from the Strahov dormitories marched to complain about poor electricity and heating. Police broke up the Strahov protest violently. These were warning signs inside the party, not yet the reform movement, which only took shape in the following year.
Why the year matters
Seen together, the protests of 1967 had different causes: a war, a visiting dictator, university rules, and a state that many young people thought was too stiff. Yet they shared methods and a mood. Students watched one another, copied slogans and tactics, and read the same books. The Students for a Democratic Society model in the United States, the Berlin socialist student organisation in Germany and the Zengakuren in Japan were separate groups, but their members often knew of each other’s work.
It would be an overstatement to say the movements were coordinated. They were not. What 1967 gave the next year was a set of trained activists, a stock of tactics, and a public that was already used to seeing students in the street. That is why historians often call it the prelude to 1968 rather than the climax.